Something about legacy

I thought long and hard about what I should write my penultimate Stute Editorial on, so I chose a topic relevant to everything: legacy.

Be warned, I am about to dip into some deep stuff here.

To sum up a lifetime’s discussion, I will state the following as preface: I have no religious beliefs that are concurrent with any prominent movement or organization. In short, there is no guarantee of a ‘heaven’, in my opinion.

That said, I’ve had to grapple with some tough questions over my short time here on earth: why am I alive? This is the big one that I am going to address here.

Why are you alive? Under the hypothetical possibility that your life is all you have, what purpose is there to live if you are going to die? For a long time I struggled with this question, and did my best to ignore it. I think, in freshman year, something finally clicked, and I was given my answer to this question: legacy.

Legacy is an all-encompassing concept that explicitly addresses your impact after death. In essence, your legacy is what you leave behind for the people that succeed you and live past you.

In this life, which is only so long, we as humans have the ability to make impacts far greater than any other being on the planet, for better or worse. Because of this, what we do with the precious time we have is extremely important. Eventually, some of us will become parents, and will have the responsibility of raising our children right so they can make an impact on the world. Even if you don’t, you have a responsibility to yourself and the planet to make impacts of your own, if you don’t, when you die you’ll simply perish, and you won’t have much to be remembered by.

Now, to wrap this into relevant topics. Let’s think about The Stute.

I, oddly as it may be, came into The Stute‘s lead position knowing full well that in one year, I would leave. This outlook gave me a unique perspective and allowed me to shape The Stute and its members into the fighting force this newspaper needed them to be. When I started, things were a little messy, and we’ve gone about cleaning up the place, physically, digitally, and organizationally. With a cleaner environment, with a more streamlined agenda, we moved ahead and gathered more people, more freshmen than I have ever seen join The Stute at any given point in time. And once these new folk were around, we began easing them in to our positions. I watched as Lisa Mengotto [Editor’s note: one of our columnists and now executive board members] went from not knowing how to write a column to arguably the most popular columnist we have at The Stute. I oversaw the transformation of a few veteran members of The Stute from underling to overseer, especially in the case of Frankie Guarini, who went from zero to sixty, so to speak with his Managing Editor role. I remember when he joined The Stute, an odd-humored fellow who only contributed infrequent, but quality work. Suddenly I am relying on him to assemble all of the news and opinion pieces, cracking hilarious jokes along the way, and he is doing better than I ever could have anticipated.

These people, if I could say so, are my proudest achievement on The Stute. I may have optimized our organizations processes, but giving direction and purpose to these hardworking people is absolutely something I am proud of.

My legacy, at least with the newspaper, is them, and I am sure they will do fine when I’m gone.